


under pressure

by buckstiel



Category: Campaign (Podcast), Star Wars - All Media Types
Genre: Fake/Pretend Relationship, Hutt Culture, M/M, Miscommunication, Post-Kanan, Rescue Missions, Tryst Gender Lore, Undercover Missions, Uneasy Allies
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-07-16
Updated: 2019-07-16
Packaged: 2020-06-29 15:52:35
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 12,994
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/19833466
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/buckstiel/pseuds/buckstiel
Summary: With Bacta and Synox in the clutches of notorious clone enthusiast Zorrod the Hutt, Tryst, Leenik, Zero, and Blue are forced to work together at his annual Boonta Eve Soiree to break them free.





	under pressure

**Author's Note:**

  * For [chocolatemudkip](https://archiveofourown.org/users/chocolatemudkip/gifts).



> it's hard for things not to get away from me when i'm playing the indulgence game, so. anyway! Ch0c0lateFr0g i hope you enjoy!!
> 
> thank u for the beta feraldanvers, you're the peachiest peach

Zorrod the Hutt wasn’t known for much--he wasn’t particularly ruthless or wealthy, nor had he ever gotten under the feet of the Old Republic enough for them to care. His lair on Savareen stayed out of the way of the Empire’s business, and outside of the couple low-level bounty hunters occasionally subcontracted from the Sneak and Tubaik Organization, he had no guns at his beck and call.

When pressed, Two-Shoes and Pinwheel did agree on one thing: Zorrod the Hutt had a fascination with clones.

“They didn’t say it was sexual, Tryst,” Lyn said before the thought could even formulate in his head.

“And neither did I!”

“Well,” Leenik sighed over Lyn’s shoulder. “You didn’t have to.”

“ _Any_ way.” Lyn cleared her throat and motioned for the two of them to look over the notes she’d been taking on the datapad for some reason Tryst couldn’t pin down, seeing as they resembled some kind of personal shorthand code. Or something. “I took what we got from those two goons and ran it by some pirates Zara knows who’d at least worked adjacent to Zorrod’s circle. It all checks out.”

“What did they say about the clone thing?” Leenik asked. He rested his head on Lyn’s, his snoot lying right between the goggle lenses atop her forehead.

“That it wasn’t sexual,” she said pointedly. “And that was coming from a crew member that apparently thinks everything is, according to the acting captain.”

“My kind of guy.” Tryst waited for either of them to jab back, and when they didn’t, he slumped into the booth across from Lyn. “Okay, so we know _who_ took Bacta and where he might be. That’s a start.”

It was more than they’d had the last five days in their standby orbit over Taris. _I actually did have some things to take care of on Vanquo before we hopped over to Mandalore_ , Lyn had said as they left Iloh, and then it’d been nothing but a sharp simmering stomachache of worry. Outside of his bunk, at least. He didn’t need anyone else to dig deeper past that, least of all Tamlin.

If any of them was going to be stolen away mid-mission from right under their noses, it wasn’t going to be Bacta. They’d even gone so far as to make contingency plans in case of non-purposeful captures for each of them _besides_ Bacta.

So really, if Tryst were being honest, their current situation only made sense. The _Mynock_ had a pattern and stuck to it like--well, a mynock to a windshield.

“I also traded an unspecified future favor for a tip on a possible way in,” Lyn said. A couple taps on the datapad brought up a holo of what Tryst assumed was the entrance to Zorrod’s lair--stringed lights outlined the front facade, trailing out to poles stuck precariously in the sand dunes on either side of a strip of carpet leading toward the door. Whatever color it was, even through the flicking blue of the holo its color was muted by the sand burying into the fibers.

“The front door, okay, okay…” Leenik said, nodding. “I mean, there’s probably a better way, but it _is_ direct _and_ unexpected--oh! Are we getting captured on--”

“Boonta Eve,” Lyn said loudly, “Is a major holiday in Hutt culture. Festivities vary from planet to planet--Jabba hosts a podrace… and Zorrod throws a big fancy party.”

And they were on the list.

“Well, not _us_ -us, you know, but--”

“If you’re implying Cinnamon Rex isn’t a part of me, well,” he scoffed. “I assume that’s a name on the list.”

The smile Lyn gave him was unreadable, equal parts anxious and curious with a weird glaze he could only pin down as glee slathered on top, and put together he wasn’t quite sure how to respond. He looked to Leenik, but he was still frowning at the holo rotating over the table.

He stuck a suction-cupped finger right into the middle of one of the holo guests, a male Gran arm-in-arm with a woman of a species Tryst had never seen before. “So… does everyone come with a date? Is it like--is it required?”

Lyn’s smile descended from unreadable to straight-up gibberish.

“Are you seeing this?” Tryst motioned to her.

“What--oh god, Lyn,” Leenik said. “What’s going on with your face?”

“I think she’s spent too much time with us. Only explanation.”

With a casual shrug, she swept away the holo and pulled up another diagram of Cinnamon Rex beside Leenik in a stuffy Imperial-approved tuxedo. “The esteemed Zorrod the Hutt warmly welcomes Eeno Tull and his date, Cinnamon Rex, to the Seventeenth Annual Boonta Eve Soiree on Savereen.”

Three separate duracrete blocks plopped into Tryst’s stomach mulling over Lyn’s plan.

The first: another false name was given to Leenik like they didn’t all know how that played out.

The second: Lyn didn’t appear to have a way to get herself into the building, and while at first he expected there was a third slide to the presentation, the reality of the situation quickly tapped on his shoulder. They couldn’t ask Neemo to go into a Hutt lair undercover as Lyn’s date, and Tamlin couldn’t be left alone on a planet like that.

The third was staring him in the face with a violent indigo blush from ear to snoot.

Despite all argued evidence to the contrary, Tryst wasn’t an idiot. He’d figured out Leenik had _something_ going on for him after he’d jumped at the offer to sleep with him for science as they answered that last advice letter that landed in their inbox. He’d figured that was an odd outburst for him, and he’d figured it warranted a trip down memory lane, all the way back to their first day at BHIKKE, and he’d figured it would help ease Leenik’s nerves if he found him in the galley making toast after everyone else went to bed and made out with him against the conservator, knocking every magnet to the ground in the process.

He’d figured that would be the end of it. Issue resolved, scratch it off the list.

Leenik’s eyes twinkled with twice the number of stars than usual, the blush lining the bottom edges like the most garish eyeshadow in his arsenal.

On second thought, Tryst might be an idiot after all.

*

Three days later, standing in line to present themselves on the Soiree’s red, sandy carpet, Tryst had readily accepted that he was an idiot.

Cinnamon Rex, however, was most certainly not, and she was the one hanging off Leenik’s arm, technically, so everything was going to be fine. They were going to waltz in, waltz around the dance floor, and scoop Bacta out the back door and away from this Ring-forsaken planet. They were going to move on with their lives, maybe give themselves another week on Iloh to decompress before moving on to real rebel business.

“Do I look okay?” Leenik murmured, squirming.

“Stunning, my dear,” he said as Cinnamon, and then under his breath: “You’re fine. Stop fiddling with the tie before it _stops_ looking okay.”

A strange pang of guilt settled into Tryst’s chest. This wasn’t fair to Leenik, who had finally stopped fidgeting as they took a step forward in the line. And it’s not that he wanted to lay it on that thick and watch the blush rise slowly up his face--the ties to Sneak and Tubaik meant that Cinnamon Rex likely had a reputation to maintain among the partygoers. It wasn’t his fault, not completely.

(“It was the only reason we could get you on the list in the first place,” Lyn had said the day before. “Bounty hunters are serious gossips.”)

It didn’t help that the last three nights, his dreams had taken orbit around their kiss at BHIKKE, or their kiss getting settled with the Verpine, or their kiss that had cracked the rooster-shaped salt shaker and sent the Shelova magnet skittering deep under the booth. Aava and Bacta hovered on the edges, there but also not there, and the dreams always pushed past the boundary of his memory until he woke with a start--covered in sweat, every nerve alight, half-wondering where the suction cups on his skin had gotten off to.

Dreams meant nothing. He’d had dreams like that about tons of people with lots of repeats. Bail Organa, for instance. The woman who ran the cantina on Takodana. Zevowc, exclusively over comlinks. Just because they fixated on one of his crewmates this time didn’t change anything.

“C’mon, honey, we’re next,” Leenik said--a touch too loud, no finesse, but he didn’t stumble over the words, not even the pet name.

He left the stumbling for both of their feet on the carpet, which made navigating the sand into something far more difficult than it needed to be. If their scheme was going to fall apart before even getting inside because Tryst snapped an ankle from stilettos on an uneven surface--it’d be fitting. But it’d also be a bigger setback than they could afford.

Thankfully Leenik managed to keep him upright by the time they made it to the bouncer, a milk-white Twi’lek that could’ve been the cousin of Jabba’s own personal assistant--for all Tryst knew, they probably were. They had the same sharpened teeth and thin lekku that could wrap around their necks like scarves, but the man before them now had a bit more light behind the eyes under a thicker brow.

“Glad tidings to you on this Boonta Eve,” he rasped, bowing slightly. “Invitation, please.”

Tryst handed over the datastick, which seemingly passed the inspection at the datapad in his hand.

“Many thanks. And who do we have the pleasure of welcoming?”

Only then did he spot the figure looming over the Twi’lek’s shoulder, a hulking masked Togorian holding another datapad--Lyn’s famed list.

(“Leenik, you need to give the aliases to the bouncer. Zorrod thinks a fancy party means following every outdated Imperial etiquette protocol to the letter. Can you do that?” Lyn had asked, both hands on his shoulders. “Can you say your names are Eeno Tull and Cinnamon Rex?”

“Yeah, sure.”

“Leenik--”

“I’ll be _fine_.”)

Sweat pooled at Tryst’s temples, and the crook of Leenik’s arm began to squeeze tightly at the carefully manicured hand resting there. If the Twi’lek bouncer had eyebrows, they’d be rising higher as the moments ticked onward; behind him, even through the mask, Tryst watched the Togorian’s eyes narrow.

“Well,” Leenik said, at last, sighing far louder than any undercover mission warranted. “If you must know, I am Eeno Tull… of the Rodia Tulls, of course. And this is Cinnamon Rex, my--um.”

The hardest part should have been over. He’d gotten the names right on the first try for once--

“This,” he tried again, motioning to Tryst, “is my ex-lover, Cinnamon Rex. It’s a bit awkward to come together, but I promised her we could come _ages_ ago, and I figured it was too much trouble to get anyone new vetted on time--”

“Fine, sure, go on in,” the Twi’lek said. He stuck his head inside to announce their arrival and practically pushed them through.

Once over the threshold, Tryst could finally digest what Leenik had told them.

 _Ex_ -lover?

In his new ongoing quest to be less of an idiot, he could only assume that was code for something, a pointed remark that conveyed that he was done with his eccentric pining after it became clear that Tryst was only toying with him and that he no longer wanted to have anything to do with them in a romantic or sexual context ever again. It was clear as day, and Tryst was most certainly not wondering if his sudden chest pains counted as a medical emergency.

And Bacta--kriff it all to the deepest Rings of hell, they still had to get Bacta. That, he wanted to mull over even less than this rigmarole. Leenik’s unambiguous rejection just happened to coincide with an ache around his ribs, but the thought of leaving Bacta to these Hutts…

“Eeno,” he said. “I think I’m going to go get a drink and then we can go find… _that friend you were talking about_.”

Scanning the crowd, Leenik waved an okay, and Tryst glided between the other guests with every last ounce of grace Cinnamon Rex had at her disposal until she slipped herself into a spot at the bar’s corner between two preoccupied humans. At the moment, the droid bartender was fixing up drinks for a throng of Gamorreans dressed in what probably amounted to their idea of a formalwear guard uniform.

Cinnamon sighed and folded herself into a chin-in-hand slouch. “What’s a girl got to do to get some service around here?”

And sure, it was technically to no one in particular. But Cinnamon’s face was tilted halfway to her left when she said it, and in retrospect, the man to her left historically didn’t pick up on these sorts of things too well.

Because the man to her left was Minister Blue.

“ _You_ \--”

“Me?” Tryst said, and then looked over Blue’s shoulder to find who could only be Agent Zero. His trademark helmet had been replaced with a deep blue head wrap and face veil, but the stature was unmistakable. “ _You!_ ”

“Yep,” Zero sighed. “Me.” The veil must have obscured his vision more than he was used to because Tryst could follow his gaze from the tilt of his head, tracking up Tryst’s body from the delicately embroidered waist to his trusty grenade-grade breasts and finally to the moneymaker itself. The realization made him physically recoil. “ _You--_ ”

Earlier that evening, before the _Mynock_ took off to a safer docking spot, Lyn had emphasized that comms were a last-resort. “We don’t know what they’ve got in there,” she’d said. “I don’t want anyone slicing into our system.”

Grimacing, Tryst discreetly put a finger to the receiver in his ear and pressed the call button. “Hey…” he said, staring down Blue and Zero’s livid faces. “We’ve got a complication.”

*

With Leenik in tow, Zero dragged all three of them into a storage closet off the main room with all the subtlety of a herd of stampeding varactyls. Fortunately it seemed as though most of the attendees were already too drunk to pay them any mind.

Stepping away from the action had seemed like a smart move, but in the close confines of the closet with barely a foot between their two parties, Tryst was having second thoughts. The web of who-wanted-to-kill-who had more than enough threads to tie them all up, revenge for roof-tossings and hand-slicings and whatever moods the _Mynock_ ’s actions had stirred in Aava, who undoubtedly inflicted them on the rest of the _Bluebird_.

With the way Zero’s cybernetic eye glowed angrily behind the veil, Tryst knew that he was imagining all the ways to shove his vibrosword through his chest, and that his heart would stop before he knew what had happened.

“So are you going to tell us what you’re doing here, or what?” Leenik snapped, crossing his arms. He glanced around the mess of cleaning supplies on the shelves above Blue’s head, the naked bulb humming in the socket, anywhere but Zero.

“You first,” Blue said.

Leenik made a face. “No!”

Sighing, Blue ran a finger over one his eyebrows in what could have been some attempt to clean up the arc. (A vain attempt, in Tryst’s opinion, if that was indeed what it was.) “Look: I think if we were to both think about where we are, whose company we are quote-unquote _enjoying_ this evening, what we have in common…” He sighed again, clearly impatient. “It shouldn’t be hard. I mean, I _am_ making an assumption here, but--”

“You’re here for Bacta?” Leenik blurted.

“Synox. We’re here for _Synox_ ,” Zero said.

“So not even you Imperials are safe, huh?” It was as close to a purr that he could manage without going full-Cinnamon, and the splash of blush that rose to Blue’s cheeks was worth whatever new murderous thoughts Zero was directing at him now.

“Just--just stay out of our way, and we’ll stay out of yours.” Blue opened his mouth like he had something else to say, but Zero put a hand on his shoulder. “Please.”

“Fine,” Leenik said.

“Or…” Tryst held up both hands, waiting until he could feel each set of their eyes hooked in his orbit. His fingers wriggled, the gleaming ruby red of his lips ticked up to a smirk--“Or...we could work together. We get our identical friends out and go on our merry ways.”

The closet did not get good comlink reception--Lyn cut in and out in his ear, something about _absolutely not_ or _over my dead body_ or whatever, and if the grimace on Blue’s face was any indication, Aava was giving them the same treatment.

“It doubles our chances of success, the way I see it.” He shrugged, moved to mirror Leenik’s pose with the crossed arms, adding a popped hip for good measure. An emphatic accent never hurt any Valentine negotiation.

Rings, he needed this to work--not because he doubted his and Leenik’s own abilities to rescue Bacta. No, they’d pulled off more complicated and dangerous stunts in the past. They were all still alive, weren’t they? Inquisitor Sahdett hadn’t sliced them in half. Grand Moff Tarkin didn’t have them in holding cells under a fleet of torture droids.

The _Bluebird_ was just a threat with a brightly-lit path to being neutralized through some good, old-fashioned bonding under pressure.

He could explain it to Lyn later, as long as she didn’t immediately throttle him at the end of all this.

(And if two extra people in their team meant a distraction from this conundrum with Leenik, that was an added bonus.)

“Fine,” Blue said after a few moments. “But only because we’re down all the tools in Zero’s HUD.”

“Trust me,” Leenik grumbled. “We don’t like you either. Wait--” He pointed one of his long metal fingers between Blue and Zero. “How’d you two get in if Aava’s not here? I didn’t think they’d count someone with a bodyguard as a ‘couple.’”

It was like someone on the other end of the closet had opened a door to space the way the air was sucked from the room. Blue and Zero were ready to suffocate too, desperate gaping and reaching for some sensible string of words to make the whole question go away. The blush Tryst had forced to Blue’s cheeks burned across his whole face, from the tips of his ears to beneath his starched collar, while Zero was testing the wall to see if it could absorb him on the spot.

“Aava, see--” Zero managed. “She said no more undercover garbage like this--”

“We’re posing as lovers.” It came out loudly, an odd squeak to Blue’s tone and the last word wrecked by a clean, pubescent crack.

Their full situation took several minutes to extract between Blue’s reticence and Zero’s continued efforts to become one with the duracrete. While Blue’s name and Zero’s’ appearance were recognizable and easily linked to Synox, the opposite didn’t apply; a couple fake names and a helmet swapped for different, more feminine headwear would do the trick.

Zorrod the Hutt had heard through the jogan fruit vine that Parn Nevisse and Oni Tafar were still deep in the honeymoon phase of their relationship, and such displays of affection at the Soiree were half the reason he still hosted it.

“And how’s that going?” Tryst asked. Of course he already had some idea, but it didn’t hurt inquiring--or, it didn’t hurt _him_. And weren’t those the best kinds of questions?

“It’s going fine, thank you,” Blue snapped. His face had reddened so deeply that it clashed with the violent orange of his hair. “So if we’re--kriff… going to be working together, how’s that going to work? Did you have a plan?”

“Did _you_ have one?” Leenik said.

“Believe it or not,” Zero sighed, the veil fluttering, “it’s actually pretty hard to get close to a Hutt. Even one as low on the chain as Zorrod.” When Leenik squinted at him, he added, “We were working on it.”

A metallic grinding rang in Tryst’s ears as he worked to get his brain in motion. Something about Zero’s reasoning didn’t sit right, but anything aside from the vaguest shadow of it slipped from his fingers like a dianoga tentacle.

“Well, we don’t have all night!” Leenik huffed.

“Okay, but we do. We do,” Blue said. “Though ‘tonight’ is still a finite amount of time, so.”

 _Kriff,_ Blue was insufferable. No wonder he threw him off that roof.

“Wait…” The little buzz of the memory finally got those gears humming. “Why would we need to get close to Zorrod? He’s out enjoying the festivities, but the clones aren’t. They’re probably somewhere else in the building.”

He didn’t spare the glance, but Tryst could feel Zero quietly fuming at him--it was such an effective fuel, people’s ire. He drew it in, offered Blue a dazzling smirk from Cinnamon Rex’s repertoire, and kicked up the sparkle with a wink to Leenik before he realized what he was doing.

Whatever Leenik’s reaction was, he didn’t want to see that either. So he kept his eyes on Blue, that terrible beet-red nerfherder, pleading with the Ring and whatever else in the galaxy was listening for Bacta to come back to them already.

(They really were a mess without him. He’d have to remember to apologize for that later.)

*

Growing up on Tatooine, Tryst had heard tales of Jabba’s palace, seen the enormous cylindrical towers rising over the rocky knobs interrupting the horizon and the array of shadows they cast in the light of the setting twin suns. It appeared larger than life then with the power of a child’s imagination, and when he set foot inside for the first time for the _Mynock_ ’s first official job under Jabba’s purview, he expected to be let down. No sand dune was as tall as the one climbed in youth, and it was never just on account of erosion.

But Jabba’s palace caught the eye of Tryst’s inner child that day with a furtive wink. The entrance tunnel through the rocks splayed wide, weaving deep into the hills and opening up to the kind of space the cantina down at Mos Eisley could only dream of. And further still the palace sprawled past his reception hall, to narrow halls and secret rooms and trapdoors under their feet that Leenik had been all too aware of with the echoes of the grumbling rancor. It was everything Tryst could have hoped for all those years ago.

Zorrod’s accommodations were nothing of the sort.

Sure, Tatooine was a backwater planet, but Savareen was at an entire other level--there were only so many resources, and in a negotiation between Jabba and Zorrod, no one had to guess who would be coming away with a landslide victory.

In short: there weren’t many places for Zorrod to stash his little enclave of clones.

Unfortunately, that also translated into a smaller number of places for Zorrod’s security staff to guard, and he had plenty of staff to go around. A surplus, even. Blue had relayed as much with a sniff, numbers crunching in his head to confirm Zorrod’s wasted credits and his own smart choices sticking with Zero, and only Zero.

(Of course, that blush hadn’t subsided either, and neither had Tryst’s amusement about it.)

In the half hour Zero and Blue had in the Soiree before Tryst walked right into them, they had managed to overhear some snotty Imperial engineer from Coruscant complaining about the local terrain and how unstable it was even deep underground.

“Apparently the whole building is at risk of being swallowed by the sand,” Blue said with a sarcastic bite of enthusiasm.

Zero only pinched the bridge of his nose from underneath the veil. “What he means is there’s no lower basement level or anything. It’s only what we can see.”

Leenik muttered something under his breath, something that sounded like _thank the stars_ or a curse in his mother tongue about rancors or rathtars or other terrible beasts, and his hand closest to Tryst’s was ripe for the taking. It was just there, open, and he fought the distraction back like those rabbits that had taken over the hyperdrive.

The hall their supply closet occupied was short and dead-ended in a paltry kitchen that hadn’t seen a good deep clean since before the rise of the Empire, and there were no additional exits that led to other rooms.

“How can you be so sure?” Leenik said slowly.

“I’m sorry, do _you_ want to go open every pantry door and smell all the spoiled dried gorba they got in there?” Zero said, and that was that.

That only left the other side of the main hall--Zorrod sat at one end of the oblong room, and off to one side, near the end of the bar where Tryst and Blue had bumped into each other, was a door. From the angle outside, he facade of the building had hinted at additional space stretching into the back.

“The only problem is that there’s a huge Togorian guarding that door,” Zero said.

“Oh no,” Tryst said. “We saw them outside. They’re on guest list duty.”

“There’s more than one Togorian in the galaxy,” Blue muttered, and Zero shrugged in agreement.

“Well, I do hate to hear that.”

They all agreed--and more quickly than usual--that the Togorian had to be lured from their post. But that didn’t account for Zorrod’s other agents working the rest of the room, blending in--

“If you know what they look like, I could--” Tryst had barely waggled his eyebrows and hiked up his dress before everyone else in the room shut him down.

“It’s a big room,” Zero said. “We have to make our way over there _gradually_. And you can’t…” He waved one of his cybernetic hands around the general direction of Tryst’s face. “You can’t distract any of Zorrod’s other minions because… kriff, you’re the best shot with the Togorian, okay?”

“Okay, so I _do_ get to--”

“Just get them away from the door long enough for us to get inside,” Zero muttered something else to himself, the veil softening the words until they were unintelligible. Blue glanced up at him and then away in a huff, reaching for some setting on his glasses before jerking his hand back to grip at his knee.

At this point on the _Mynock_ , Bacta and Lyn would have been stashing the clipboard and hurrying everyone down the exit ramp, Lyn verbally herding them with little nudges of reminders and Bacta falling into some soft clapping to rouse up their collective energy--it wasn’t a duty Tryst wanted to take on, that herding. After all, what was he, responsible?

Not innately, no. But it certainly wasn’t beyond him, not completely.

“You all do know we need to actually carry out the plan for this to work right?” he said. “Laying everything out isn’t--”

“Shut up,” Blue grumbled, and he led the procession out of the closet.

Tryst held up the rear, but before Leenik stepped out into the hall after them, he snuck a glance back. His flesh hand came up to the crook of Tryst’s elbow, offered one squeeze and another half-aborted one--and for once in his life, there wasn’t anything Tryst could gather up to say.

*

The crowd in the main hall of Zorrod’s lair had thickened since their closet conference, and someone--Tryst had no clue who--suggested they should split up in their maneuvering toward the door to throw off suspicion. How it would throw off suspicion was never quite articulated, but there was only one way to split their party evenly without guaranteeing someone drawing a blaster.

Normally the difference between “guarantee” and “highly likely” was negligible, but these were desperate times.

“Listen,” Tryst hissed into Zero’s ear. His face was plastered with the coy grin that so often accompanied a secret, but his words held the knife under it. “You want to kill me over what I did to Blue, and I can’t say I wouldn’t do the same over what you did to Leenik. But we can resume that tomorrow, all right?”

He pulled back, splaying a hand on his collarbone like Zero had just told a scandalous joke. His grin turned wide and threatening--he hoped.

After a beat, Zero rolled his eyes and flashed an “okay” sign with his hand held at hip-level.

A few knots of people over, Blue and Leenik stood next to each other as stiffly as living beings could without having succumb to some form of early rigor mortis. An Ishi Tib behind them snapped their beak on their takings from a vegetable tray while eyeing them with suspicion--one of Zorrod’s agents, or a regular guest overly attuned to the uncomfortable energy radiating off their shoulders like a solar flare?

Impossible to tell. The song the band was jamming away on was reaching its peak and the crowd responded in kind; the Ishi Tib disappeared, replaced by a Gran and two bored-looking humans pulled into the orbit of Leenik’s fronds and Blue’s red hair.

Even if they were on a mission, Tryst couldn’t deny himself just a little bit of dancing to some good music. He bobbed his shoulders while maneuvering to the other side of Zero. “Y’know,” he said, “I think Blue is into you.”

And before Zero could react, Tryst threw an arm around his shoulder and whooped at the precise volume that had made some of the ysalamiri screech in their bonsai trees. “ _GIRLS NIGHT!_ ”

Right on cue, a few older diplomat-looking types scooted away from them.

“I loathe you,” Zero said under his breath.

“The feeling is mutual, but I am telling it like it is: it’s girls night, and Blue is thirsty for it. It being you.”

“Please don’t say it like that.”

“Telling it like it is. Don’t know how else to put it.”

Tryst felt himself settle into Cinnamon completely while giving the room a quick sweep--a Togorian with a dark blot of a blaster on their hip stood in front of a door at the opposite corner, halfway in shadow from Zorrod’s perch of honor along the back wall. A handful of other party guests all had a gold pin of an angular character attached on their left lapel: a Trandoshan, a Weequay, and a few other humans Cinnamon recognized as the type to frequent Outer Rim cantinas.

“You think those could be Zorrod’s people?” she nodded.

“Hard to imagine what else the zerek could stand for,” Zero muttered. “But good catch.”

Zerek. Right. Zerek for Zorrod. Made sense. At least that cleared the Ishi Tib that was still hovering around Leenik and Blue of any notable suspicion.

With a lilting laugh, she looped her arm with Zero’s and tugged him along to another drink stand--not as well-stocked as the main installation, but also not as crowded, and it was closer to their end goal. “Oni, you _scamp_ ,” Cinnamon gasped as they sidled up to the stand. “I can’t believe--I mean, you tell me,” she said to the wide-eyed bartender, a female Mirialan with strings of diamond tattoos for eyebrows. “If you were to run off with _your_ beau into the deepest reaches of the Unknown Regions for a spell, what kind of rumors would you expect upon your return?”

The Mirialan blinked at her for a moment, then grimaced at Zero. “Well… um… the honorable Zorrod has three cocktails on special tonight--”

“All right, all right, I understand, dear. We’ll both take his favorite.”

She grinned at the bartender the entire time it took to prep their drinks, ignoring the hot lasers of hatred beaming straight from Zero’s eyes--it could have been real lasers, given his cybernetic, but she didn’t want to check, and it wouldn’t have made any difference. The Mirialan was mixing a wild concoction of some Pamarthan Port in a Storm with meiloorun juice and crushed herbs, and no one could hate anybody after a few sips of _that_ grog.

(Her first four-way was a Port in a Storm production, as was the revelatory conversation months later with one of the parties in a back booth on Takodana where she could admit to herself for the first time that being Tryst meant being Cinnamon too, though she didn’t have that name yet.)

The drinks they were handed were deep red, not quite burgundy, and stung her nose when she brought the glass up for a sip. Under the veil, Zero’s eyes squinted with his first taste, but she didn’t let it linger; her hand took his again and pulled him deeper into the crowd where the dancing was turning into a rising and ebbing tide of bodies. The next time she saw Zero’s glass, it was half empty. Which she could work with.

“Are you not into Blue?” she said in her ear, avoiding the lumbering steps of a drunk Gran. “The charade earlier was--”

“It’s complicated.”

“Do you want to take him apart or not? It’s a simple question.”

Zero downed another inch and a half of his drink. “He’s technically my boss.”

“When I worked at the JW Marihutt, I thought my shift leader was the hottest thing in the system. Answer the question.”

There was something about the way Zero moved when he was frustrated and fed-up that rang too familiar for Cinnamon’s comfort, but she didn’t have the luxury to dwell on it as he threw the rest of the cocktail back. “Fine,” he said, draping himself on her like they were close friends. “I’m in love with him and I know he’ll never openly be with a non-human, much less another man, but I don’t trust anyone else to make sure he stays alive. Happy?”

“Delighted.” She threw back the rest of her drink, the Port in a Storm sizzling her tongue and throat and the tips of her nerves, dulling them the perfect amount to make this entire plan seem like the most reasonable idea this side of Felucia.

This was much more interesting than any interpretation of her own predicament, and she could exploit that all the way to the deepest Rings of hell. “Thank you for indulging my curiosity,” she continued, “but let’s get on with what we came here for.”

The low growl hummed through Zero’s entire body but he said nothing as she guided him further into the mass of people. Leenik caught her eye over the shadowed hills of heads before turning away so sharply that he forced Blue to slosh some of his bright teal drink onto his jacket. Nothing surprising there, even if Cinnamon flushed despite herself. It was fine. It was going to be fine. They had a story to sell, anyway.

One of the Weequay with the zerek pin was milling about behind Zero. “Oh, _Oni_ ,” she cried over the music. “Just how do you and Parn keep that fire alive? Eeno and I, we--” Crying on cue never came easily, but she tried to force it. A memory of a particularly potent nightmare does the trick, one with Tamlin and Louphan and Tusken Raiders with spider legs, and she dabbed away the tears before it could ruin the makeup. “This is going to be our last event together. I have to win him back!”

The Weequay glanced her way, gave her a once over, and moved on to Zero’s thin figure as he stared at Cinnamon like she’d grown a second head. They’d always assumed that Aava wasn’t the only one with common sense on the _Bluebird_ , but perhaps they had to reconsider the theory.

“I should make him jealous, shouldn’t I?” she said, winking, and finally Zero’s brain came back to life.

“Oh, yeah, totally… uh, girlfriend…?” The finger guns were a bad touch, but she could work with that.

“I need a man that’s the opposite of Eeno in every way… that’ll let him know I could get anyone I want, and it’ll drive him nuts.”

And maybe she should have kept a closer eye on the Weequay as they bantered about what it meant to be the opposite of a Rodian. She probably, really, truly should have because as soon as she realized she’d lost sight of him, he reappeared at their sides, dipping his head between them to interrupt.

“Forgive me for eavesdropping,” he said with a smirk, “but His Eminence Zorrod has taken notice of you, ma’am, and requests that you join him at the head of the ballroom.”

The Weequay extended his hand toward her, and she took it without hesitation. It was hard enough to not react to him calling this increasingly cramped space a kriffing ballroom--she could talk her way out of the situation once she was there, surely. Not everything had to be nipped in the bud.

“What an honor,” she said, being led away. “Oni, go tell Parn the exciting news!” But Zero was already shoving his way back to Blue and Leenik.

The dias upon which Zorrod sat was probably the most expensive thing in the whole hall, a polished agate with orange and red stripes that gleamed even in the low lighting, and especially against the dull cracking rock that made up the rest of the building. A silver protocol droid stood before them, motioning up the couple steps with their rust-spotted palms.

“The mighty Zorrod is pleased to have you join him this evening,” the droid said.

She bowed just as the Weequay did after delivering her. Bacta would be so proud of how well she followed the cues this time, when it counted for his sake--except the bow didn’t nudge the formality’s script along. She bowed again. Still nothing. The protocol droid swept their stiff arm back again toward Zorrod, coughing.

(Coughing? Could droids cough? Was that a programmable sound file or--)

Oh. _Oh_.

Jabba had an arrangement like this sometimes--she’d heard as much for most of her life, seen as much on the occasions the _Mynock_ had an audience with him. A beautiful woman gripped close on a leash as the hourglass of Jabba’s mood slowly tipped her toward her fate at the hands of whatever nasty beast snarled under their feet.

Zorrod laughed something in Huttese, his stubby hands slapping his belly. “The great Zorrod knows that look,” the droid translated, “and wishes to convey that he does not employ the barbaric practices of his cousins.”

Someone should have probably told Bacta and Synox that—approaching his side, still Cinnamon forced a wide grin as the droid babbled on about Zorrod’s love of conversation and penchant for petty gossip and appreciation of the feminine wit and whatever else they’d said before Zorrod tipped her head towards him by the chin.

His bulbous eyes were even larger than Leenik’s, a muddy green against the same sand-brown of Jabba, except where Jabba’s skin tinted olive, Zorrod’s was the same hue of the agate dias. Along the top of each nostril were three silver rings, immaculately clean of the slime that oozed from their pores. In fact, out of all the Hutts that she’d met, Zorrod was the only one whose odor didn’t land like the hand of one of her jilted lovers.

“I hear you’re having troubles with your man,” Zorrod said, without the aid of the droid. He spoke low enough in his accented Basic that it couldn’t travel outside their bubble over the music. “Tell the mighty Zorrod everything.”

Moments like these were the worst part of leaning into the woman in her--none of the other tricks that would let Tryst wriggle out of a problem seemed to work the same way, and she hated it. She hated it because it was the one time the unpredictable pendulum of her gender shrunk away from one end in time with the fear curdling under her skin, and she hated it even more now because she couldn’t let that happen.

There was the _mission_ to think of. There was Bacta, and Leenik, and--the _Bluebird_ , too, but mostly her family. So she let her eyes crawl over Zorrod’s face as sexily as she could manage, letting them settle on the tip of that putrid tongue peeking right overtop his lower lip. “Happy to oblige.”

He coiled his tail tightly enough that it could act as a chair; it only squelched mildly as she sat, undoubtedly still ruining the dress Neemo put together, and he pulled her into his side by a tenuous hold on her hip. “Hold on, dear, I just saw a couple guests I wanted to talk to.” He switched into Huttese, his booming voice commanding attention as the droid translated to the rapt collections of partygoers on this side of the hall.

“The gracious Zorrod requests a public audience with the esteemed guests Parn Nevisse and Oni Tafar,” they said, weight shifting between their two feet in some odd imitation of fidgeting.

The band hadn’t stopped playing, so not everyone had their attention focused on Blue and Zero making their reluctant beeline to the dias, but it was enough to make Leenik look a bit queasy and press a finger to his ear. The comms hissed with static, which was just as well. The less Lyn knew, the better.

Zorrod continued using the droid as a translator. “The esteemed Zorrod is enthused that happy couples such as yourselves have chosen to spend your Boonta Eve with us on Savereen. As an avid connoisseur of romance, the great Zorrod would be most grateful to hear how you two met and got together.”

Watching Zero and Blue mentally scramble, Cinnamon couldn’t believe that Aava willingly associated with them; and it wasn’t that they didn’t have any skills at all, because otherwise how would they have woven themselves that far into the Empire? But Aava could pull herself together even operating outside her usual realms of expertise, and the same could not be said about these two, apparently.

For one, Blue was verbally tripping over himself in a way unbecoming of a propaganda minister, and for two, Zero had frozen to the spot. One of his hands dug into Blue’s shoulder hard enough to bruise and was on its way to start making the bone whine under the pressure.

“See,” Zero said finally, his voice pitching up almost comically. “I had gotten into a terrible accident trying to tame a wild fathier, and my sweet Parn saw the whole thing--got me right into a bacta tank!”

“If it had taken much longer, the medics weren’t sure if she would’ve made it.” At least Blue didn’t need to know how to act to lay on such a smarmy tone.

“He visited me every day,” Zero said. His arm wrapped around Blue’s shoulder, pulling him flush against his hip. It was too natural, how he slid into the affectionate notes that turned Blue’s cheeks that awful shade of pink. “And you know how one thing leads to another.”

Blue cleared his throat in a most inelegant fashion. “It sure does.”

Under Zorrod’s gaze, Zero’s arm slid down from Blue’s shoulder and landed on his hip, long fingers curling around what had to be the boniest part of an already bony body, pulling him closer. And Blue leaned into it. His face smoothed out the twitchy edges of panic, and Zorrod was beside himself with joy.

The droid continued on for him: “The magnificent Zorrod requests that you indulge him with a--um, public display of affection, as we on Savereen love love.”

Blue cleared his throat again, sounding like he nearly choked on the effort. “Beg your pardon?”

In the moment Zorrod made a terrible effort at producing a kissing noise with his mouth, Cinnamon was too preoccupied with how she was going to needle Zero about this later to notice Zorrod’s hand on her cheek until it had pulled her closer to him.

Anatomically, humans and Hutts were never meant to kiss. A Hutt could fit an entire adult human head in their mouth and still have room for a full twelve-piece serving of fried gorba, and any attempt at kissing was a risk that this could occur; of course, that didn’t stop everyone from trying. There was an entire fetish community on the HoloNet dedicated to that scenario specifically, in fact, one that she liked to keep tabs on just to have plenty of material for getting under Bacta’s skin.

Said scenario was much less amusing experiencing it for yourself, as it turned out.

It wasn’t much more than a peck, a demonstration to cut through the droid’s translation--thank the _Ring_ there wasn’t tongue--but whatever Zorrod had done to mask the signature Hutt scent had not applied to the taste, and it was all Cinnamon could do to keep from gagging.

“Yes,” the droid said after a moment. “That is what the great Zorrod meant.”

Blue and Zero glanced at each other, pulling apart from the position they’d finally found some comfort in; even immobile, Cinnamon sensed the silent negotiation happening between the pointed blinks and hesitating movement of their fingers.

(For a moment, she almost felt sorry for them--Zero, who had explicitly outlined how he felt, and Blue, who clearly was in the same boat under approximately seventeen layers of repression, forced to confront this in themselves under the eager eyes of strangers. But it was only a moment, and she didn’t quite arrive at pity.)

In a single sweeping motion, Blue pulled Zero to him by the back of his head with one hand, unpinning the veil with the other. Their mouths crashed into each other with a jolt, hesitation melting away bit by bit until it looked natural enough to convince a Hutt cartel that they were the long-happy couple they thought they were.

All the while, Blue held Zero’s veil so that it obscured their faces on Zorrod’s side--undoubtedly he had his reasons, but Zorrod tugged at Cinnamon’s dress before she could think longer on it. “They’re precious… I can’t get enough of this sort of thing. Hutt culture doesn’t… _value_ romance in the same way.”

She nodded, but absently. As he spoke in her ear, she scanned the crowd for any sign of Leenik; he’d disappeared from the edge of the circle afforded to Zero and Blue.

“A shame…” she said, finally spotting Leenik’s ear stalks bobbing behind a line of Sullustans knuckling shot glasses over their heads. He was on his way back from somewhere along the other side of the room and weaving through the knots of people without hesitation, which was rarely a sign that he was in a good place, mentally, but that edge to him faded once he reappeared at the circle that had formed around Zero and Blue.

Who were still kissing.

“Would you consider this excessive?” Zorrod whispered. “I’m fine, but I think my main supplier from Utapau seems uncomfortable, and I can’t afford to lose his business--”

“Better safe than sorry--”

“An excellent point, sweetheart--” And he switched back into Huttese, the droid babbling something or other to the band, who kicked it into high gear with a classic energetic jizz tune from the Kaj-era Old Republic. Swinging legs and hips knocked Blue and Zero apart, their subsequent eye contact pushing them back another couple feet, and then Cinnamon lost sight of them. Wherever they went, it wasn’t together.

“Now…” Zorrod sighed. “Where were we?”

The longer she sat with him, the more her skin found his oils unbearable and the more the smell was starting to permeate whatever barrier had spared her before, and Leenik wasn’t even pretending not to stare at them at this point, and that certainly needed addressing. When the entire room pulsed in time with the music, the lone immobile Rodian could only stick out.

Forcing a grin to her face, she walked two fingers up Zorrod’s belly to where his chin would be, if Hutts had them. “I think just being here with you helped pull my man to his senses.”

Zorrod’s eyes sparkled after her as she hopped off the dias and through the drunken dancing, and she could almost, _almost_ feel herself warming up to the unexpected romantic of a Hutt responsible for the most acute of their problems. But she found herself rushing up toward Leenik’s rigid frame before she could think much more on the matter.

His hands latched around her hips and pulled her close, his tongue worrying at the top lip of his snoot, and the way his suction-cupped fingers were digging into the skin, through the dress, it was pulling his male side back to the forefront, a smirk sliding onto his face, and he echoed the movement perfectly: on the beat, curling fingers around the small of Leenik’s back until they slammed flush together. Tryst’s vision fuzzed for a moment, refocusing on the sheen in Leenik’s eyes, his chin tilted up until his whole neck was exposed to that snoot he’d tried not to linger on since their encounter in the galley.

“I didn’t like how Zorrod was looking at you,” Leenik said, throat tight around the words.

“Yeah?” Oh, Tryst wanted to let his hands wander. Leenik’s ass was right there, small and tight and ripe for a handful, but even given their undercover story that would have been a stretch, so he just resecured the hold they had. Their hips were even more flush together than they had been that night on the _Mynock_ , and he could only assume that any sign that Leenik was hard against him was just a trick of the lingering Port in a Storm.

“And he kissed--ugh, it was--”

“Oh but Eeno,” Tryst sighed, and loudly. “I’m a free woman, and if I want to kiss Hutts--”

Leenik’s cybernetic fingers clenched into his hip--any harder and he could have tracked the blossoming bruise in real time, but as it stood, it was the perfect spark of pain. “Z--our… partners ran off,” he said, ushering them both away from Zorrod’s dias. “And we’ve really got to head back to that door.”

The timing couldn’t have been more eerie. As soon as Leenik pulled a hand back to massage his temple, a whole host of Zorrod’s goons swarmed the back corner where their target Togorian had stood, only Tryst couldn’t spot any Togorian towering over the other heads in that direction.

“Wait--what did you do?” Tryst hissed under his breath.

“You looked like you were going to be tied up with Zorrod, so I took care of it!”

“What does that mean?”

Leenik’s mouth curled into a tight frown as he produced a small knife from his pants pocket. The blade still had drying splatters of blood along the edge.

“Kriffing _hell_ \--”

“There’s a diversion now--”

“This is why Lyn and Bacta want you to go to talk to that Bendu guy on Atollon--”

“Don’t bring that up--”

“You can’t just _do_ shit like this!”

Tryst expected Leenik to harden like had before under such accusations, but his shoulders sagged instead. The grip of his hands on Tryst’s hips eased to something softer, easier to approach, and the finicky set of his mouth calmed Tryst’s nerves faster than any amount of alcohol could have managed.

“Well, I did it, and we need to get in there already, so…”

“Fine. I said _fine_ ,” he added when Leenik opened his mouth to protest. “Where’s… what’s-their-names, uh.. Parn and Oni?”

In an ideal galaxy, they would have been in the same place and likely continuing the show Zorrod had forced them to give, but--

“Well, there’s Zero right now,” Leenik said, pointing over Tryst’s shoulder.

He didn’t have time to remind Leenik about codenames now, as good as he’d been on arrival. “Where’s your other half?” Tryst said.

The light at the center of Zero’s cybernetic eye flared. “Don’t--”

“This isn’t me being cute. Eeno here got the door clear. We need to make moves. Though,” Tryst sighed. “For the record, I’m always cute. But--” 

“I’ll go find him.” Leenik’s eyes caught the light from the blue-tinted bulbs emerging from the ceiling, and whatever was in them found the curve just right, new stars winking into existence until there was a whole nebula in each eye. In the moment they glanced at each other, Tryst couldn’t breathe. And then he was gone.

While he focused on catching his breath, Zero wasn’t keen on making conversation. They slowly edged their way toward the end of the bar closest to the door, not far from where Leenik had left them, and after the third partygoer stepped on Zero’s shoes, it was evident he wasn’t completely there.

Who could blame him? Not Tryst. The timing wasn’t great, though, so he’d have to blow a little blame in his face.

“So…” Tryst said, sitting on the word almost a little too long. “How are we feeling?”

“ _We_?”

“That was too long of a kiss for it to be totally fake.”

“Blue is…” Zero said slowly. “He’s intense. All or nothing. It probably meant nothing to him, and now I have to live with that.”

“But you did get to kiss him,” Tryst said. One of the bartenders brought up six shots of clear liquor for a group of five Twi’leks, and he snuck the one that got left behind. “That’s something.”

“It isn’t anything.” Zero wasn’t someone Tryst knew well, much less at all, but he had the sense that he rarely sounded this dejected. “It’s holding an ice cube in your hand after wandering around the Jakku wasteland for three days.”

Four tasteless dirty jokes sprang to mind, but for maybe the first time in his life, Tryst reined himself in. It wasn’t anything to be proud of, the apparent self-control, because it wasn’t that at all--his mind’s eye played out the whole scene with Leenik in the galley again, their scrambling hands and Tryst’s knee between Leenik’s legs and the specific, almost reverential whine he pulled straight from Leenik’s chest from worrying under his jawline.

There was nothing he could say to Zero for that.

He resigned himself to people-watching: the dancing had gotten sloppier the longer the booze had flowed, and Zorrod had a new ear to whisper in (a Pantoran man in the latest high fashion from Coruscant), and no one with a zerek lapel pin had come to replace the Togorian’s watch. No one had even come to wipe up the dripping trail of blood leading away from the door.

The group of Twi’leks came back for another round, but Leenik and Blue arrived before Tryst could snag another one of their shots.

“Let’s get this over with already,” Blue said, hardly looking at Zero before pushing his way to the door and over the threshold.

They all followed suit without much fanfare and landed in a dark, featureless room with one other door, clearly locked from the way Blue was fiddling with it. Zero hovered over his shoulder, trying to nudge him aside without much luck, and just as Tryst was settling in to watch the spectacle, he felt a tug on the side of his dress.

“Hey…”

“You said…” Leenik interrupted himself by screwing his eyes shut, and when he opened them again, his focus was squarely on a chipped bit of paint along the floor molding. “You said Bacta and Lyn were who wanted me to go to… y’know, wherever. Do you not… did you--”

Lead sat in Tryst’s stomach. There were nightmares he’d had since that fight with Sahdett: ones where the hoard of drones had overtaken them, ones where those stormtroopers they recruited to their side changed their mind, ones where Sahdett skewered Leenik through the stomach and cut off Leenik’s head and left Leenik’s body for ruin, and ones where Leenik and Sahdett stopped fighting each other. Those were the worst of all. Both of their lightsabers hummed blood-red in the cave. Leenik’s face was blank as he shoved the blade into Tryst’s heart.

“Atollon is _their_ plan,” he said. “I don’t know enough about that place to know if it’s a good idea. And I’m going along with it because it’s still the best plan we have right now.”

 _Because I’m worried about you, because I love you_ \--that he can’t say. Not now. Not when Zero finally shoved Blue aside and sliced the lock open and pulled them back into the moment.

“See?” Blue said, striding into the next room. “This is why the Empire doesn’t do business with Hutts. This is completely inefficient, overly-dramatic, and--”

“The Empire thrives on overly-dramatic, in case you forgot,” Zero said.

They pointedly looked anywhere aside from each other in a way that could easily lead to them walking into some elaborate trap straight out of Lyn’s adventuring stories--and that just wouldn’t do. It’d be such a mess, and Aava would never speak to him again.

But before he moved to join them in whatever disappointment they’d discovered, he found Leenik’s hand. Squeezed it with all the sentiment he couldn’t force himself to say, hoping desperately there was something in his face that was more decipherable than the vague pressure at their palms. He didn’t let it last enough to see Leenik react.

“Okay, all right,” Tryst said, following after Zero. “What’s--oh.”

“Yeah,” Zero sighed.

The room they’d broken into was a small, empty cube with the other three walls holding a door with another complicated lock around the knob. And who knew what laid beyond those doors--another three doors, or more of Zorrod’s goons, or some smaller beast with the mean tilt of a rancor? Tryst had never been great at math, but the number of doors blossomed in his mind’s eye all the same, three and nine and twenty-seven and then he couldn’t keep count, and Bacta was lost in the shuffle.

“This doesn’t set a great precedent,” Blue said. “And I know we heard there couldn’t be basement levels here, but at this point…”

“We’re not leaving without Sy,” Zero said.

“W-- _obviously_ , I just--” Blue cut himself off, shifting into a tense whisper that drew Zero close enough for their body heat to mingle brightly in the tight space between them.

“What’s the hold-up?” Leenik said, appearing at Tryst’s side.

“Complications.”

Leenik glanced down at his chrono, muttering to himself, which couldn’t have been a good sign. Getting caught back here after the party wound down would only land them in the same holding area as Bacta and Synox, or likely some place worse.

“Are you talking about the door options or…” He pointed to Zero and Blue.

“Both at this point.” He had half a mind to throw their business out in the open, unequivocally, so they could stop pretending it wasn’t dialing up the pressure on their insides to unbearable levels. But that would only solve one of their problems. “If they’re not going to do anything…”

They had come into this mission without accounting for Blue and Zero, and they could continue it without them too. Tryst walked up to the closest door not obstructed by their argument and put his ear to it; the wall was thick, but the snarling of Correllian hounds was unmistakable. Cool. Great. Fine. He definitely didn’t have a scar on his thigh from the time Jubna accidentally let Malakili’s hound loose when they were kids. “Okay, so we’re trying that one last.”

Passing Zero and Blue on his way to the second door, he picked up a snippet of their conversation, and it had long shifted away from the matter at hand--something about Coruscant, and Bail Organa, and Grand Moff Tarkin, and Tryst was exceedingly not interested. He was even less interested after listening beyond this next door.

It must have shown on his face.

“Is it them?” Leenik said. “Do--wait.”

“There’s at _least_ six people in there,” Tryst said, making a suggestive hand gesture.

“Okay, okay.” He held up both hands in surrender, hardly looking at Tryst as he strode over to Zero and Blue and pushed them apart. “If you’d _excuse us_ , we’re trying to find our friend.”

Blue spluttered spectacularly. Tryst hoped it would never end, but eventually it had to, condensing into vague attempts at words and then, “If you ever manhandle me like that again, I’ll have Zero cut your other hand off!”

It all moved quickly--Leenik grabbing Blue’s wrist with his cybernetic hand; Zero positioning himself between them with one hand around Leenik’s flesh wrist and another nudging Blue back; Tryst pulling the small holdout blaster from the holster attached to his garter and aiming it right at Zero’s temple.

Blue blanching was even better than his spluttering, as it turned out.

“Reconsider that,” Tryst said, staring dead at Blue.

How he’d convinced himself that this plan would end up anywhere but here was beyond him. Sure, he’d thought, most everyone here has a reason to want half of the others dead, but walking that tightrope without activating one of those hair triggers would be laughably easy. They’d strut out of this soiree arm in arm with Bacta and Synox in tow, ready to take on the galaxy.

 _Right_.

“And what if I don’t?” Blue hissed.

Tryst pressed the barrel of the blaster fully against Zero’s head, clinking against a metal plate there. “Look--”

“Blue, just drop it,” Zero said. “I’m not cutting off Leenik’s hand. Once is enough.”

“More than enough,” Leenik muttered.

“Do you want to get Sy or do you want to keep having the sixth version of that argument about the Gala? And here’s a hint: we can have that sixth argument literally kriffing anywhere.”

Blue’s mouth pressed into a thin line, not quite a frown. There was some internal negotiation happening just behind his eyes with the way that they’d twitch around Zero’s face, nearly vibrating at the effort not to look in Leenik or Tryst’s directions. “Fine.”

Carefully they untangled themselves, giving each other another foot of extra space. Tryst cut across to Leenik before he realized where his feet were taking him, and he could only nod at those big, expressive eyes until the reminders of the mission at hand started pressing in from all sides. They still had a door to check. They still had Bacta to find. And when there was nothing he could hear on the other side, he couldn’t decide if he was relieved or not.

He relayed their options to the rest of them. “Obviously this is the safest route, but…”

“Knowing _why_ Zorrod’s collected all of these clones would be helpful,” Zero said. “Like... _is_ it the kind of reason that would justify Corellian hounds?”

“I’d rather not assume so,” Blue said.

That was enough of a vote for Zero to start working on the lock, Leenik hovering behind him. They almost looked natural like that, like some tensed part of Zero had loosened with the proximity, and Tryst didn’t know what to make of it. What Tryst did know, however, was that Blue was beside him, and that Blue was in a foul mood, and that his more reckless tendencies were clawing for his attention.

“So what’s that whole gala argument about?” he said. “Must be pretty important if this is the sixth time--”

“None of your business, Valentine.”

“Oh, I think you made it my business when you jeopardized my friend’s rescue getting into it again.”

“Why do you care, anyway?” He sounded like a petulant child, and his crossed arms didn’t help. When Tryst didn’t answer right away, he added quietly, “Have you ever wanted something you shouldn’t?”

“All the time--and I know what you’re going to ask next,” he said, leaning in conspiratorially. “So no, it’s literally never stopped me. Well, okay, not _never_ , but I always tried. Because what the kriff do those other people know?”

At the very least, getting those two to resolve the bullshit they’d been skirting around would make them less likely to lash out. The _Mynock_ didn’t have the credits for another Rodian prosthetic--or any other resources to help Leenik through that kind of fallout again. Tryst turned back to him, his finicky pointing over Zero’s shoulder that got slapped away in a near-regular rhythm. Over the ambient noise of the room and the music starting to leak through from the party, he thought he heard Zero chuckle under his breath. Just barely.

It wasn’t like the crew of the _Mynock_ were open books--Bacta had enough in his timeline that was blank, and Lyn was the definition of tight-lipped, and Tryst himself had glossed over the worst parts of his childhood so deftly that no one thought to look for them. But Leenik, he’d fooled them all for years, acting so open with his romance novels and wigs, his little quirks and the heart on his sleeve. He’d never discussed where he came from, so maybe there was nothing to tell.

So they’d been wrong, but they loved him and could only try to help before the body count climbed any higher; and in between the dreams of Leenik pinning him to his bunk by his hands and snoot, Tryst imagined them lying together, slotted up next to each other, his fingers weaving around the fronds on Leenik’s head as he listened to old stories from Rodia and wherever else before Grizelle brought them together in that cantina. The hold of Leenik’s shoulders would be looser after as he applied Tryst’s makeup, not because they had a mission or anywhere to go, but because there was the pull and she let it sway her. And it wasn’t like anyone on the crew cared, but Leenik cared least of all.

Oh, _kriff_ he was really in deep.

Blue was, too. There was some comfort in that, the way he was squirming.

“Aha!” Zero punched the air triumphantly. “We’re in!”

“That was so much more complicated than before,” Leenik said. “Hopefully that’s a good sign.”

“You think Sy and Bacta are going to be on the other side?”

“I mean--”

Zero reached to open the door, but Blue held up a hand to pause the whole scene. He glanced at Tryst, giving him a stiff nod, and strode up to Zero with an air of confidence severely undercut by the shaking hands at his side.

“Uh--”

“Agent Zero,” Blue said, halfway clipped and only slightly wavering. “Regarding earlier events tonight, I would be open to--or… pleased, actually, to do so again. If you so desired.”

Zero looked like the cybernetic parts of his body were about to short circuit. “Now?”

“I, um… sure, we can do now--”

“No! I mean… you’re doing _this_ now? Considering...” He motioned to the door, probably grimacing behind the veil. “Not that I--”

“Nevermind, forget it. Forget it! I can see this was a misunderstanding on my part.” Blue shouldered his way between Zero and Leenik, hand reaching for the knob but stopping suddenly. Zero’s hand hovered over his, pulled his attention back--first to the length of his outstretched arm and then to his face and the bright eyes glowing from the dark. “What?”

Zero sighed. “Your timing is just… a mess.” And with both hands cupping Blue’s face, he kissed him, not even caring that the veil caught between their mouths. It was brief anyway, a gesture more than anything. “Let’s talk back on the ship, okay?”

Even from a side profile, it looked as if Blue’s face was going to split open with how wide he grinned, growing wider still as Zero’s hands lingered and traced the edges of his bottom lip--it would have been truly sweet had Leenik not been standing on the other side of him, throwing desperate looks back at Tryst he couldn’t begin to decipher the nuance from.

Tryst cleared his throat.

“Right,” Zero said, pulling back. “Right, right, right--”

“Synox,” Blue nodded.

“Synox!”

Once again Leenik caught Tryst’s eye, but this time Leenik was on the verge of laughing, hardly hiding it, and he hoped it was mirrored on his own face, the look that pooled warm at the center of him.

This doorway did, in fact, open up to a collection of clones--about ten of them all gathered against the walls and their three additional doors, exhausted and clearly fed-up. Synox sat at the far corner between a clone with a full, bushy beard and another with piercings all through their ears and face. Nowhere among them was Bacta.

“All right, it’s time to go!” Tryst said, clapping his hands together. “Do try to be discreet, the party isn’t over yet--okay.” They all pushed past him in a wave, all except for Synox, who stood at Zero and Blue’s side.

“That swarm’s not going to go unnoticed,” Zero said.

“It’s fine,” Tryst said, lying. But he hoped Zero couldn’t sense that.

“Everyone out there is probably wasted by now anyway,” Leenik said, and he had a point.

Still, he didn’t want to test it. Synox hovered behind Zero and Blue as they headed out, each movement laden with some awkward uncertainty on how to leave this weird little alliance they had, aborted waves or salutes or even a hand on a shoulder. When they finally headed back toward the main hall, Blue’s hand was slotted in Zero’s back pants pocket.

And then they were alone.

“Well… Bacta’s got to be in one of these next ones, right?” Leenik said, hands going to his hips. Tryst watched as he checked the doors as he had, a nervous energy winding up his limbs until his verdict on the second door was a haphazard near word salad about baby varactyls and those drop bears Bacta went on about.

“Hey, hey…” Tryst got a hand on both shoulders, caught his eye, helped him calm his breathing. “It’s fine. You can slice a lock just as well as Zero can. Obviously this third door is the one. We’ll find Bacta and get out of here.”

Nodding, Leenik steeled himself and turned toward the last door. The lock looked nearly identical to the last one they sliced, but Tryst had been around enough to know that didn’t necessarily mean anything. Leenik began to work, picking and prodding, and after once piece of metal fell away from the lock, he said carefully, “You helped do that for them, didn’t you?”

“Do what? Blue and Zero--”

“Their whole… kissing thing.”

“Well, not entirely.” A thin metal rod dropped into his hand from where Leenik was working, and he held it up like he was trying to be a proper workbench. “Zorrod’s involvement was his own idea. That was just a coincidence.”

“Okay.”

He worked a bit more, taking the rod from Tryst’s hand and replaced it with a handful of screws and bolts that threatened to roll out of his palm.

“Why did you say Eeno and Cinnamon were exes?”

At this, Leenik dropped what was in both of his hands, scrambling to pick them back up before the clatter of them hitting the floor had fully faded. “It was just the first thing that came to mind. I panicked. And…”

“And what?”

Leenik said nothing. He continued to work, and Tryst continued to hold out his hand for his various tools, and eventually the lock clicked open.

“And _what_ , Leenik?”

“I don’t know!” he said, half shouting. “You--you...you’d already kissed me three times and it didn’t seem to matter, so I thought you didn’t--”

It wasn’t the right time. Zero and Blue had just had this conversation but Tryst couldn’t stop himself--he rushed forward, pulled Leenik into a bruising kiss, letting his leg latch around his hips as far as the slit in his dress would allow. Leenik gasped into his mouth. A hand gripped Tryst’s ass, and he crowded Leenik against the door, the whole situation escalating faster than it had in the _Mynock_ ’s galley. He reached to undo the bowtie around Leenik’s neck. Lost his balance. Felt his hand flailing in the open air for a hold and finding it on the knob, only for the whole of him to start falling forward as Leenik fell back with the door swinging open into the next room.

“I don’t know what else I expected.”

Pulling his face up from Leenik’s chest, he found Bacta staring at their heap, a grin fighting to stay off his face.

“Well, we’re here aren’t we?” Tryst said, jumping to his feet.

The other clones in the room hurried around him as Leenik pulled himself back together, brushing off the dust from his pants.

“Like I said,” Bacta sighed, clapping them each on the shoulder. “Don’t know what else I expected.”

*

They welcomed Bacta back to the ship with a big ham dinner, something Lyn and Neemo whipped up and wouldn’t let Leenik touch no matter how hard he protested. Tamlin shoved spoonfuls of pi-steak-chio ice cream against Bacta’s mouth until he opened up and tried it in earnest, and Tryst gave a toast every time he thought of something to honor, which happened about every ten minutes.

Neemo’s sewing skills with the dress, the fact the ham was edible, Lyn’s plan to get them into Zorrod’s lair, Leenik’s lock slicing skills, Tony’s irresistible puppy-eyes begging at the table--as long as they kept egging him on, nothing was safe. The bottles of Verpine wine they’d kept stashed under the galley sink were starting to pile up empty.

(No one needed to voice exactly why it was playing out like this. It was one thing to face down an inquisitor, their single front united by a meticulous plan; it was another thing entirely to have one of their own scooped out from under them, lost to the galaxy unless they knew the right palms to grease. That terror was nothing they wanted to address--not now, maybe never--so they drank.)

“Listen…” Lyn said, eyes squeezed shut. “Boys-- _listen_.”

“We’re listening!” Bacta said.

“Okay, great. So,” she said. “ _Listen_.”

She never quite got to her point, something about having a link to Aava during the whole mission and reports of lowered blood pressure drowned further in the extra glass she poured for herself.

After breaking out of Savareen’s atmo, they’d jumped one system over to Christophsis, hovering in orbit, and the crystalline mountains tinted the whole planet blue like an ocean, but unnaturally so, lights distorting from golds to greens sparking facet to facet. It was a nice view, distracting for the drunker members of their family as Tryst herded them to their bunks--a role reversal he wasn’t sure he loved.

And then he was alone, save for Leenik hovering by the entrance to the galley.

“Hey.”

“Hey…” A smile flickered onto Leenik face and faded just as quickly.

“You don’t seem wasted at all… you want a nightcap?” Tryst nodded behind him to the booth, and he led them there, motioning for Leenik to sit as he pulled out some liquor they hadn’t touched over dinner, a sweet red concoction the shopkeep said came from Alderaan. Two fingers apiece poured into the last two clean glasses, foggy from use.

He slid Leenik’s glass across the table before sidling in beside him.

“Oh--”

“What?”

“I just--I thought you were going to sit on the other side. That’s all.”

“Do you want me to--”

“No! No. It’s fine!” Leenik quickly took a sip of the drink, shoulders hunching up at the unexpected taste. He studied the glass, the vertical chip along the side discovered after a particularly bumpy space battle not long after Socorro. “Tryst…”

Leenik still wouldn’t look at him. The chip was only so big, only had so many angles, but he kept staring at it all the same, like the firmness of the glass could keep his voice from wavering.

“When you kissed me on Savareen, what did you mean by that?” It came out in a single breath, all the words pressed together on all sides.

“You said that the other times didn’t mean anything,” he said. “And I thought--well, the easiest way to show you that you were wrong was to kiss you again! I thought,” he added, seeing Leenik was still focused on the glass. “Plus… I wanted to. I like kissing you.”

Finally Leenik met his eye. “Really?”

“Yeah! All of the above.”

Genuine fear wasn’t something Tryst was used to seeing dull those big galaxy eyes, and he wondered if he shouldn’t have been so blunt with him. Maybe Leenik had to ease into it more slowly than he anticipated, and he probably shouldn’t rest his hand on his knee under the table--

Then Leenik’s hands were suddenly braiding into his hair, tugging him forward until there was barely any space between them at all. “You’ve turned my kriffing life upside down.” And he closed the distance, so gentle and hot that already Tryst felt like he was ready to fall apart. To think he could have had this all along, the two of them--he could make up for lost time, could climb into Leenik’s lap and sink into the feeling as fast as a stone.

But Leenik’s hands were unsteady in his hair, still unsure. _Still_. They could work on that, and Tryst could go slow. He would go as slowly as Leenik needed.


End file.
